A sad day all round

Just after I wrote my blog entry this morning about my ‘new’ aircraft carrier model, my wife received a telephone call from her father. His partner – a lady that he has shared a house with on and off for the last fifteen years – died yesterday at her son’s home after a long battle against a variety of different illnesses, including breast cancer.

As my father-in-law no longer has a car, we drove down to Herne Bay, Kent, to see him and to make sure that he was coping alright. We also wanted to give him any support or help that we could. We offered to drive him over to see his partner’s son, but they had already spoken on the telephone before we arrived, and had decided that it was probably not yet the right time for him to visit. We spent several hours with my father-in-law, did his shopping, sorted out his bank account, and generally helped keep his mind occupied. He is a tough old bird, and despite being ninety five years of age, he is still very mentally alert … even if he is a bit deaf. When we left, we told him to get in contact if he needed anything before next weekend, which is when we plan to visit him again.

In the great scheme of things, one person’s death may not seem very important except to those who knew them, especially at a time when so many people are dead or dying in Libya for their political beliefs or are dead in Japan as a result of a natural disaster. Stalin is reputed to have said ‘A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic' ... but he seemed to have forgotten that each of those deaths was an individual tragedy to the dead person’s family and friends. As the death toll rises in Libya and Japan, there are many people there who do not know what has happened to their loved ones, and my thoughts and prayers are with them. I hope that yours are as well.